Who’s Ready for 20 Months of #Emailghazi?

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

The Clintons have ridden out much worse news storms than the new one whipped up over Hillary Clinton’s emails: Whitewater. Monica Lewinsky. Vince Foster. The secretive health task force. Juanita Broaddrick. The Marc Rich pardon. Gennifer Flowers. Travelgate. Benghazi. Webb Hubbell. Waco. Paula Jones. Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But the email-squall falls so squarely in the thunderstorm-prone, moist mid-latitude weather zone that Hillary Clinton has inhabited for most of her career and so feeds our assessments and biases about her that I expect continued and punishing precipitation on her political ambitions.

(And, indeed, Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton ensured that this story will live on for days to come, tweeting that she hopes the State Department will release her emails as soon as possible—as if she didn’t have copies she could turn over tomorrow. Get ready: There will be many more news cycles to come on this story.)

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Of course Clinton set up a personal email domain the day of her Senate confirmation hearings. Of course, once confirmed, she avoided using a State Department email address altogether and set up her own server to maintain control over her email archives. Of course she knew the day would come that her emails would be FOIA-ed by the press or her political foes. Hell, she’s so clairvoyant she probably knew that when that day of reckoning arrived it would leave her a little damaged. But I doubt that even Clinton anticipated that violating some squishy procedure that dictates the handling of emails would produce a media uproar.

The press would never force an ordinary politician to sweat over such an indiscretion unless the emails actually contained newsworthy surprises. But Clinton’s hide has been so tenderized by scandals and pseudo-scandals over the past two decades that the hounds of the press can’t resist nipping on her flesh when they catch the scent.

Not that they shouldn’t be nipping. Whether deserved or not, the Clintons have a reputation of behaving as if they’re above the rules and shouldn’t be scrutinized. Last week, the Clinton Foundation typically answered a critical Washington Post story about the questionable donations it has received from foreign governments by changing the subject to talk about all the good work the foundation had done. What’s slightly crazy about the Clinton Foundation’s dodge is that by this point Hillary Clinton knows she’s not a blank slate to the press, that the legalistic quality of her responses (and those of her husband) makes them only more suspicious and her evasions will inspire the press to dig only deeper. She has deep experience in how the press responds to her ambiguous responses, her circumventions, her defensive posturing, and all the other techniques she has depended on during times of crisis. And yet here we are again, with the press asking legitimate questions about Clinton’s poor decision-making and message-control mania, and here she is again attempting to repel them with the same old techniques.

So much for the birth of a “new” Hillary Clinton.

If the stories about the emails prove more damaging that the story about what’s in them, Clinton will have nobody but herself to blame. But I’m willing to predict that reporters will find news in the Clinton emails, especially in the ones her advisers reviewed and didn’t surrender to the State Department. Journalists can always coax news out of emails (or ordinary paper and ink letters) by placing them in a new context. Hypothetically, Clinton might have written an email about Libya or Syria at the beginning of their civil wars, or about the U.S. relationship with China or France that, when placed in a contemporary framework, make her look duplicitous, ignorant, cold or—worst of all—wrong, and therefore damaging to her presidential ambitions if disclosed.

Clinton has another potential worry in the volumes of emails she sent and received. As a legally trained politician and a practiced diplomat, she was probably disciplined in what she sent out over her own signature. But nobody has that sort of control over the email they receive. Again, hypothetically, her colleagues at the State Department and elsewhere may have emailed her messages that imply or spell out that Clinton knew about something controversial and erred in her diplomatic response. Nobody wants to be held accountable for the contents of the messages that flow into their inbox, but everybody is. Messages that look safe in the moment can turn into campaign bombs in a matter of weeks, hence Clinton’s decision to defuse them in advance by concealing them. (And hence Jeb Bush’s decision earlier this year, as far from his campaign start as possible, to release all of his gubernatorial emails in the hopes that the reporter mobs would feast and then lose interest long before the 2016 voting public cared at all.)

The futility of Clinton’s email prophylaxis could have been explained to her by any intern. Emails, once written, are almost impossible to erase or protect. On some email systems, you don’t even have to hit send for them to be detected! Remember how Gen. David Petraeus and his mistress-biographer thought they were keeping their correspondence confidential by writing “drafts”—unsent emails in shared Gmail account that both could read? But the FBI wasn’t fooled by their trick and found the messages. Email systems are routinely hacked and correspondence is frequently leaked. If you must use email (and I must) never write anything you’ll be embarrassed by when a hacker leaks it or a subpoena makes it public. Just ask Sony’s Amy Pascal, former Rep. Mark Foley, former Gov. John Kitzhaber, a whole Wall Street wrecking crew, Sarah Palin, Selma Hayek, former IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner, Jonathan Gruber, and many more.

Perhaps Clinton would have been more cautious about managing her electronic trail had either the Chelsea Manning leaks or the Snowden files been released before the mysterious “ Eric Hoteham” set up her private email domain, clintonemail.com. But I doubt it. Now, with the House Select Committee on Benghazi preparing to subpoena Clinton’s email trove, we can expect every bit of political marrow to be squeezed from the messages’ bones. Subpoenas have a way of self-replicating. Don’t be surprised if the rest of Clinton’s State Department circle, some of whom are said to have used Clinton’s private email domain for accounts of their own, find themselves targeted by subpoenas. The emails don’t need to contain anything shocking or criminal to damage Clinton, as long as the Republicans who run the select committee drag out their investigation until November 2016, which I’m sure they will to give the public a Clinton refresher course.

Congressional committee investigations, after all, are just politics by other means.

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